The treatment and management of incarcerated individuals is far more complex than most people not associated with prison systems and correctional facilities understand. With the advent of overcrowded prisons and computers, a variety of systems have been devised to allow the prisons to function. For example, most prisons have a system to track an offender's money account and use of the store/commissary, another system that stores an offender's health records, another that manages and tracks the work schedules of each offender and manages the jobs that need to be done, a separate system for managing the prisoner's case per se which may include his legal record, visits with counselors, lawyers, and recommendations related to rehabilitation. Further, there is a system that manages a few key future appointments for the offenders such as doctor appointments, meetings with legal counsel, and court appearances. Many of these systems are computerized, some are not. But, the fact remains, that these systems are most often separate and stand-alone.
Presently, correctional facilities do not have the ability to efficiently schedule an offender because there is no master scheduling mechanism that accounts for the time of all offenders, officers or for the resources required in order for the scheduled events to occur. There is certainly no mechanism for creating efficiencies among events for multiple offenders related to vehicles, rooms, and officers necessary. Further, no automation is available for managing resource allocation for groups of offenders with common needs but which may include offenders that are known enemies or collaborators. For examples, different events have different priorities and are scheduled by different people. A court date will be scheduled for an offender's court appearance. In the current state of correctional facilities, a counselor may then schedule a mental health assessment at the same time for the same inmate while a doctor might schedule a physical exam, again for the same time slot. None of the service providers have access to the appointments made by other service providers for the same offender or offenders. In this case, the court appearance is court ordered and will, therefore, take priority. The counselor and doctor both will be waiting for the offender to attend the other appointments. This is a waste of resources and is a chronic problem in correctional facilities.
A need for chronological reproduction of past events also exists. When a negative event occurs in a corrections facility (prison, residential and/or half-way houses, etc), the officials must investigate to determine what happened and then, determine how to prevent its happening in the future. In order to do so, they employ a number of different methods to piece details together. Those involved are usually interviewed. Time-stamped data or other information from the multiple systems described above may be retrieved in an effort to determine, for example, exactly what events transpired, what individuals were present, how the individuals involved may have interacted in the past, who else these individuals are associated with, what opportunities the individuals may have had to orchestrate the event, where the individuals were prior to the incident, whether medications had been administered accurately, etc. Putting together that kind of timeline is, presently, difficult and time consuming and, typically, yields only a very general and undetailed timeline. Further, the data presently available in the various separate systems may not provide as complete a picture as would be helpful.
What was needed was means to have a central clearinghouse responsible for managing and tracking offender schedules and enforcing priority of events. A system was needed to coordinate time scheduled and reserved on different systems related to a single offender, to resources available such as transportation and space, and means to inquire and generate reports about past and future events and scheduled appointments during a particular time frame either for a single offender or for a group. A system was also needed to coordinate all of the offenders' scheduled appointments with resources such as transportation, etc., and determine when a particular resource has been allocated to its capacity.
To meet the needs described above, the scheduling system will need to: contain or be able to received and process all the scheduling data presently stored in separate systems, to schedule future events, to analyze past events, to allocate resources and provide reports related to that allocation for determination of oversupply or high demand, and to provide chronologically-ordered reports of data fields from the separate systems in accordance with predetermined report formats and custom reports created by the user.
The first objective of the present invention is to provide a scheduling engine to manage future events, incorporate all past events, and generate chronological sets of event data.
The second objective is to provide a scheduling engine for generating chronological sets of event data wherein the chronological sets may include detail related to interaction between offenders, movement and location of specified offenders, and means to determine interactions or times when there were common locations between offenders.
The third objective is to provide a scheduling engine capable of accepting scheduling requests from other systems, and tracking all events related to an offender and all time obligations of an offender so that double-scheduling does not occur. The system should include means of setting a hierarchy among possible events and allow scheduling of higher priority events and/or changing schedules related to lower priority events.
A fourth objective is to identify an offender's unscheduled times and provide a clear means of projecting location of any offender at a given time.
A fifth objective of the system is to provide capability to track resources such as vehicles, rooms, officers as they are allocated, determine when a resource has been completely allocated, and suggest ways to reschedule offenders to more efficiently allocate the resources.